The Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) at Emory University is using the Amazon Cloud to host digital scholarship projects. The Amazon Cloud provides a cost-effective, scalable, and flexible infrastructure for small, experimental projects as well as larger, more complex projects. Key aspects of running projects on the Amazon Cloud include using instances for servers, EBS volumes for attached storage, security groups for firewall rules, AMIs for images, and snapshots for backups. The architecture separates the system from the software stack using instances and attached EBS volumes. Some benefits of the Amazon Cloud are scalability, low administration overhead, APIs, and making experimentation easy and cheap, while potential cons include learning curves, outages, variable billing, and domain

1. Using the Amazon Cloud to
host Digital Scholarship
Projects
Emory University // Robert W. Woodruff Library
Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC)
Jay Varner, @jaysvarner
Stewart Varner, @stewartvarner

2. (some relation)

3. The Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC)

4. Collaborative Projects

5. DiSC Projects: Small
Fast, experimental, cheap.
• Empower scholars to do the work themselves
• Some home-grown projects

6. DiSC Projects: Bigger
Complex projects, considerable time and/or financial commitment.
• Selection Committee
• Project Charter
• Developer Time

7. Alternatives
Cost- Accommodating Stable Flexible
effective
University Y N Y N
Web
Architecture
University VM Y Y Y N
Library Server Y N Y N
Shared Y N Y N
Hosting
Service
Virtual Private Y Y Y N
Server
Elastic Cloud Y Y Y Y

9. What we are running in AWS
• Production
– 11 WordPress Sites
– 1 Auto publishing script
– 1 Twitter Harvest
• Dev
– Development Sites (WordPress and Django)
• Backups
– All instances and volumes are backed up in
AWS

10. AWS Terms
AWS How to think about it
Instance Server
EBS Volume Attached Storage
Security Group Firewall Rules
AMI Image
Snapshot Block level copy of data

11. AWS Terms
AWS How to think about it
Instance Server
EBS Volume Attached Storage
Security Group Firewall Rules
AMI Image
Snapshot Block level copy of data
BUT DON’T THINK THIS WAY

12. Architecture
• Separate system from software stack

13. Instance: bare system and service packages
EBS Volume: mounted to instance contains:
• Software Stack/Application files
• Database files
• Configuration files

20. Pros
• Scalability
• Low admin overhead
• API
• Makes experimentation easy and cheap

21. Cons
• Learning curve
• Fear
• Outages
• Variable bill
• Domain names/DNS

22. Thanks!
Questions?
s3.amazon.aws.com/emorydisc/resources.html
stewart.varner@emory.edu // @stewartvarner
jay.varner@emory.edu // @jaysvarner